Spy games

Spy games

The declassification and release of the Central Intelligence Agency's "Family Jewels" last week isn't likely to rate as the story of the year.

There were, in this compendium of wrongdoing by the CIA as far back as the 1950s, a few references to experiments with mind-control drugs and assassination attempts and plans against Fidel Castro and others.

But a lot of the documents had to do with old news, such as Watergate, and boring domestic stuff, such as how to dispose of classified trash.

What might interest Canadians is that it reminded us how a spy agency set up to operate abroad can become involved in escapades that are far outside its mandate.

It showed how the CIA involved itself in operations with domestic political implications -- Watergate being the most instantly recognizable.

In the last election campaign, the Conservatives under Stephen Harper said they'd set up what sounded a lot like a Canadian CIA.

Last month, though, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government thinks setting up a separate agency to operate abroad would be too expensive and take too long, given the need to train agents. Instead, the mandate of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is to be expanded to allow our spies to operate covertly abroad.

This is precisely what the McDonald Commission, set up to inquire into Mountie wrongdoing in the 1970s, advised against in its report that led up to the founding of CSIS in 1984. It wanted the two functions kept separate.

It warned that CSIS would be exposed to "contagion" by an espionage agency's practice of breaking the laws of other countries.

It also said the kind of intelligence a foreign spy network collected "would go well beyond the purpose of security intelligence."

Spreading disinformation abroad, as the Chinese do about the Falun Gong in Canada, is relatively benign compared to assassinating foreign leaders to aid investors abroad or serve the interests of political ideology.

Of course there are those, such as former CSIS director Ward Elcock, who have argued the agency already has the mandate to operate abroad and that the only thing limiting its capabilities is a lack of funding.

He said that CSIS has an international mandate and that he could collect intelligence "wherever I need to."

Perhaps it was natural that he should fudge the issue to try to protect his turf, but it's pretty clear that CSIS agents shouldn't be skulking about the world in disguises, willy-nilly: They can help Foreign Affairs bring back Canadian citizens from Lebanon, support our military's effort in Afghanistan, or visit, openly, with other countries' agents; otherwise they must stay home. At least this is what we're told the law says.

The current director, Jim Judd, acknowledges CSIS lacks the authority to deploy covert agents abroad, though he regrets it. He says that countries such as New Zealand and the Netherlands have their own espionage agencies and that spies from 20 or so countries are operating in Canada.

It might be, of course, that we don't really know what's going on. People trained to operate surreptitiously in presumably high causes may not feel unduly constrained by statute: We have only to see how the Mountie security service operated after the October 1970 crisis in Quebec -- burning barns, kidnapping people, stealing dynamite, mounting disinformation campaigns, bugging cabinet ministers -- to realize that.

Maybe the security intelligence review committee, set up to oversee CSIS and report to Parliament, hasn't the handle on the agency that it should.

But nobody should be under the illusion that a legally sanctioned foreign spy agency doesn't break the law -- those of countries in which they operate abroad or international ones -- and commit what would be called crimes in Canada.

A lot of espionage and counterespionage is pretty boring stuff, but occasionally things can get close to James Bond's fantasy world. Sometimes someone might have to carry an umbrella with a poison-dipped point.

One of the reasons the McDonald Commission wanted the RCMP out of the spy business was a typically Canadian concern that those enforcing the law shouldn't be breaking it. It argued that there should be an impregnable bulwark between CSIS people looking after national security here and any outfit that might be committing illegal mayhem abroad.

Yet as Air India and Maher Arar's case have shown, there's a real problem of a lack of communication when police and security agencies operate in what the jargon calls "silos." This may be due to individual stupidity or dereliction of duty, but allowing agencies to operate in unsplendid isolation compounds the problem.

It will be some time before Canada is a big player in international espionage, but in hunting down those who would bomb Canadian facilities and murder Canadians our agents should not be confined to our shores.

But when they break someone else's law we should know it's for our security and not for some sordid political objective.

Mounties are advising the public about a sexual-assault investigation in Surrey. The assault happened...

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